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    Measles(麻疹), which once killed 450 children each year and disabled even more, was nearly wiped out in the United States 14 years ago by the universal use of the MMR vaccine(疫苗). But the disease is making a comeback, caused by a growing anti-vaccine movement and misinformation that is spreading quickly. Already this year, 115 measles cases have been reported in the USA, compared with 189 for all of last year.

    The numbers might sound small, but they are the leading edge of a dangerous trend. When vaccination rates are very high, as they still are in the nation as a whole, everyone is protected. This is called “herd immunity”, which protects the people who get hurt easily, including those who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons, babies too young to get vaccinated and people on whom the vaccine doesn't work.

    But herd immunity works only when nearly the whole herd joins in. When some refuse vaccination and seek a free ride, immunity breaks down and everyone is in even bigger danger.

    That's exactly what is happening in small neighborhoods around the country from Orange County, California, where 22 measles cases were reported this month, to Brooklyn, N.Y., where a 17-year-old caused an outbreak last year.

    The resistance to vaccine has continued for decades, and it is driven by a real but very small risk. Those who refuse to take that risk selfishly make others suffer.

    Making things worse are state laws that make it too easy to opt out(决定不参加) of what are supposed to be required vaccines for all children entering kindergarten. Seventeen states allow parents to get an exemption（豁免), sometimes just by signing a paper saying they personally object to a vaccine.

    Now, several states are moving to tighten laws by adding new regulations for opting out. But no one does enough to limit exemptions.

    Parents ought to be able to opt out only for limited medical or religious reasons. But personal opinions? Not good enough. Everyone enjoys the life-saving benefits vaccines provide, but they'll exist only as long as everyone shares in the risks.

    With the development of our society, cell phones have become a common part in our lives. Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Maybe they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on We Chat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species” of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name-phubbers (低头族).

    Recently a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities (身份) bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes a selfie (自拍) in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events finally leads to the destruction of the world.

    Although the ending of the film sounds unrealistic, the damage phubbing can bring is real. Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. “Always bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Daily quoted doctors' words. “The neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for a long time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. When getting together with family or friends, many people prefer to play their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

    A machine that takes sweat-laden (浸满汗水的) clothes and turns the sweat into drinking water is in use in Sweden. The machine makes the clothes turn round quickly, heats them to remove the sweat, and then passes the steam through a kind of special material to make purified water.

    Since it has been brought into use, its creators say more than 1000 people have drunk others' “sweat” in Gothenburg. They add the liquid is cleaner than local tap water.

    The device was built for the United Nations' child-focused charity UNICEF to promote a campaign highlighting the fact that 780 million people in the world lack access to clean water.

    The machine was designed and built by the engineer Andreas Hammar, known locally for his appearances on TV tech show “Mekatronik”. He said the key part of the sweat machine was a new water purification part developed by a company named HVR.

    “It uses a technique called membrane distillation (膜蒸馏),” he told the BBC. “We use a special kind of material that only lets steam through but keeps bacteria, salts, clothing fibers and other things out. They have something similar to the International Space Station, but our machine is cheaper to build. The amount of water it produces depends on how sweaty the person is, but one person's T-shirt typically produces 10ml, about a mouthful.”

    The device has been put on show at the Gothia Cup-the world's largest international youth football tournament. Mattias Ronge, chief executive of Stockholm-based advertising agency Deportivo, said the machine had helped raise awareness for UNICEF, but in reality had its limitations.

    “People haven't produced as much sweat as we hoped – right now the weather in Gothenburg is lousy,” Mattias Ronge said. “So we've equipped the machine with exercise bikes and volunteers are cycling like crazy. Even so, the demand for sweat is greater than the supply. And the machine will never be produced in large numbers, since there are better solutions out there such as water purifying pills.”

    According to Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, reading aloud was a common practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Readers were “listeners attentive to a reading voice,” and “the text addressed to the ear as much as to the eye.” The significance of reading aloud continued well into the nineteenth century.

    Using Charles Dickens's nineteenth century as a point of departure, it would be useful to look at the familial and social uses of reading aloud and reflect on the functional change of the practice. Dickens habitually read his work to a domestic audience or friends. In his later years he also read to a broader public crowd. Chapters of reading aloud also abound in Dickens's own literary works. More importantly, he took into consideration the Victorian practice when composing his prose, so much so that his writing is meant to be heard, not only read on the page.

    Performing a literary text orally in a Victorian family is well documented. Apart from promoting a pleasant family relationship, reading aloud was also a means of protecting young people from the danger of solitary（孤独的）reading. Reading aloud was a tool for parental guidance. By means of reading aloud, parents could also introduce literature to their children, and as such the practice combined leisure and more serious purposes such as religious cultivation in the youths. Within the family, it was commonplace for the father to read aloud. Dickens read to his children: one of his surviving and often-reprinted photographs features him posing on a chair, reading to his two daughters.

    Reading aloud in the nineteenth century was as much a class phenomenon as a family affair, which points to a widespread belief that Victorian readership primarily meant a middle-class readership. Those who fell outside this group tended to be overlooked by Victorian publishers. Despite this, Dickens, with his publishers Chapman and Hall, managed to distribute literary reading materials to people from different social classes by reducing the price of novels. This was also made possible with the technological and mechanical advances in printing and the spread of railway networks at the time.

    Since the literacy level of this section of the population was still low before school attendance was made compulsory in 1870 by the Education Act a considerable number of people from lower classes would listen to recitals of texts. Dickens's readers, who were from such social backgrounds, might have heard Dickens in this manner. Several biographers of Dickens also draw attention to the fact that it was typical for his texts to be read aloud in Victorian England, and thus literacy was not an obstacle for reading Dickens. Reading was no longer a chiefly closeted form of entertainment practiced by the middle class at home.

    A working class home was in many ways not convenient for reading: there were too many distractions, the lighting was bad, and the home was also often half a workhouse. As a result, the Victorians from the non-middle classes tended to find relaxation outside the home such as in parks and squares, which were ideal places for the public to go while away their limited leisure time. Reading aloud, in particular public reading, to some extent blurred the distinctions between classes. The Victorian middle class defined its identity through differences with other classes. Dickens's popularity among readers from the non-middle classes contributed to the creation of a new class of readers who read through listening.

    Different readers of Dickens were not reading solitarily and “jealously,” to use Walter Benjamin's term. Instead, they often enjoyed a more communal experience, an experience that is generally lacking in today's world. Modern audiobooks can be considered a contemporary version of the practice. However, while the twentieth and twentieth-first-century trend for individuals to listen to audiobooks keeps some characteristics of traditional reading aloud—such as “listeners attentive to a reading voice” and the ear being the focus—it is a far more solitary activity.

    Foxes and farmers have never got on well. These small dog-like animals have long been accused (控告)of killing farm animals. They are officially considered as harmful and farmers try to keep their numbers down by shooting or poisoning them.

    Farmers can do call on the services of their local hunt to control the fox population. Hunting consists of hunting a fox across the countryside, with a group of specially trained dogs, followed by men and women riding horses. When the dogs eventually catch the fox, they kill it or a hunter shoots it.

    People who take part in hunting think of it as a sport; they wear a special uniform of red coats and white trousers, and follow strict codes of behavior. But owning a horse and hunting regularly is expensive, so most hunters are wealthy.

    It is estimated (估计) that up to 100,000 people watch or take part in fox hunting . But over the last couple of decades the number of people opposed to fox hunting, because they think it is cruel, has risen sharply. Noisy confrontations between hunters and saboteurs have become so common that they are almost as much a part of hunting as the hunting of foxes itself. But this year supporters of fox hunting face a much bigger threat to their sport. A Labour Party Member of the Parliament, Mike Foster, is trying to get Parliament to approve a new law which will make the hunting of wild animals with dogs illegal. If the law is passed, wild animals like foxes will be protected under the ban in Britain.

    What if we could replace oil with a fuel which produced no pollution and which everybody had equal access to? The good news is that we can, in fact, we are swimming in it -literally.

    Hydrogen is one of the building blocks of the universe. Our own sun is basically, a big，dense cloud of the stuff. And hydrogen can be used to create electricity for power, heat and light.

    The problem is that hydrogen is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It does not exist as a material on its own, but is always part of something else. So it has to be separated before it can be used.

    Most commercial hydrogen in use now is created from natural gas. As oil will start to run out in around the year 2030. It makes sense to produce as much hydrogen as possi­ble as soon as we can. But natural gas supplies will also begin to run out soon after. Another source is needed.

    Researchers are now using electricity to make water into hydrogen. Companies are working on the problem in their own areas. The first commercial hydrogen "fuel cells" for computers and mobile phones have already come on to the market Auto companies have also invested over US $2 billion in the production of hydrogen fuelled cars.

    The nations of a hydrogen fuelled planet would not fight over energy recourses. There would be a great reduction in pollution, the only by-product of creating hydrogen is pure drinking water something that is very scarce in many parts of the world. But that is not where the good news ends, once the costs of producing hydrogen have been brought down, it will possibly provide power for a third of the Earth's popula­tion that has no electricity.

    And electricity creates wealth. In South Africa over the last decade there has been a large programmer of electrification. Thanks to the programmer, people do not have to spend their days looking firewood to burn for heat and with electric light, they can work long into the night

Some scientists see radical changes in the way the human race co-operates. Hydrogen creates electricity, and is also created by it. With dual use fuel cells, everyone who consumes energy could also produce it. Late at night, a man drives home in London and connects his car into the "worldwide hydrogen web", which it supplies with electricity. A few hours later, a man in Beijing uses that electricity to power the hydrogen cell in his car. Hydrogen could be the first democratic energy source.

    Like all dreams of the future, it seems very far away. But the threat of war and terrorism in the Middle East has made governments and businesses more aware of the need to end oil dependency and spend more time and money on hy­drogen resource. So maybe the threat of war is not a completely bad thing for the future of the human race.